Many restaurants and food service establishments, particularly national chain fast-food restaurants, have established strict cooking requirements for preparation of foods to control product quality and uniformity. Such establishments will often require cooking systems, such as a deep-fat fryer, which can accurately and repeatedly prepare foods to a desired standard. In this respect, most national restaurants have established cook times and cook temperatures at which particular foods are to be cooked to establish the desired quality and uniformity of the product nationwide. These standardized cook times and cook temperatures are established to ensure proper preparation of the food and to present a tasty and healthful product. Factors determining the standards set by restaurants include appearance, taste and the internal temperature of the cooked food. With respect to the latter, of primary importance in establishing cook criteria standards is that the internal temperature of the food be brought up to a predetermined minimum so as to kill harmful bacteria and ensure a healthy product.
The cooking standards or cooking criteria for a particular food are basically established through a trial-and-error technique. Namely, small amounts of the specific food product, i.e., a few french fries or one or two pieces of chicken or fish, are dropped into a cooking medium, such as oil, and monitored until the food product has obtained the desired appearance, at which time it is removed and tested to determine that the internal temperature has reached the desired minimum. After several repeated tests at different oil temperatures and times, a desired cook time and cook temperature are established. The cook time and cook temperature thus represent ideal conditions for cooking the particular food product to produce the desired end product.
As known to those skilled in the art, the cook criteria established by restaurants and food chains assumes ideal cooking conditions, wherein the cooking medium maintains a predetermined temperature throughout the cook. The standard cook criterion is also based upon an idealization that irrespective of the amount of product placed into the fryer, if each individual piece of the food product (e.g., one french fry in a batch of french fries, or one piece of chicken in a batch of chicken, or one piece of fish in a batch of fish) is surrounded by the cooking medium at a predetermined temperature, and that temperature is maintained for the desired time, all the food product within the batch will be properly prepared to the desired standard.
In reality, when a large number of pieces of cold food are placed into a hot cooking medium, the temperature of the cooking medium drops. As a result, the food product within the cooking medium is exposed to a lower temperature than that ideally determined, and thus the cooking of the food will be slower than desired. To compensate for this, fryer controllers have been developed, which among other things, control the operation of the heating element and the cook time as a function of the change in temperature of the cooking medium that occurs when cold food product is introduced into the hot cooking medium. The cook time is basically adjusted by expanding the cooking time to compensate for the fact that the food is exposed to a cooking medium at a temperature lower than that desired. Numerous systems have been developed to adjust the cooking time to compensate for the differences which exist between the actual cooking temperature and the desired cooking temperature.
The present invention provides an electronic control system that controls the cooking of the food product by monitoring heat transferred from the cooking medium to the food product.